Zülfü Livaneli, the Turkish writer, musician, singer, journalist and member of parliament, recently toured China to promote the launch of the mainland Chinese translation of his popular novel, Bliss (Mutluluk), or 伊斯坦布尔的幸福.

Now a movie as well, Bliss is a melodramatic tale of a young village woman who is raped by an elder relative. When she doesn’t hang herself out of shame, as is expected, the task of restoring honor to the family (by ending her life) is assigned to another male relative. The novel takes us from Van in the southeast to Istanbul, touching on most every controversial aspect of “Turkishness,” from honor killing to the Asia-Europe divide represented by schizophrenic Istanbul, and the guerrilla war waged by the Kurds against the Turkish state.

But how many Chinese readers will notice that this quintessentially Turkish novel has been translated from the . . . English?

Not many, I’d wager. The spine of the book features “Turkey” in brackets above the author’s name, implying that the book and its author originated in that country, and cites the translator (贾文浩). The credits page gives the same information without identifying the source language. It should be noted that this is standard procedure in the People’s Republic. Thus the only reference to the fact that this Chinese edition is a translation of the English translation is in the last line of the translator’s Foreword.

I interviewed Shen Zhixing (沈志兴), the Chinese translator of Orhan Pamuk’s My Name is Red, several years ago. He studied in Ankara in the 1980s and worked from the Turkish. The earlier Taiwan edition of the book was based on the American, and Pamuk—apparently very displeased with this approach—insisted that Shen translate from the Turkish original.

Shen told me that in his estimation, “only a dozen or so” translators in China had the background in Turkish and literary Chinese to translate a Turkish novel into Mandarin. In a country which has over ten million speakers of Turkic languages living in Xinjiang alone, that’s a bit odd. [Read more…]

I can tell you there is no market more challenging than America’s. I sell more books in China and Japan than in America . . .

Could be, and perhaps it’s the quality of the translations into the Chinese. My girlfriend read Roman Russi (蓝山) by Meir Shalev several times, and she’s on her third read of Hatsotsrah ba-Wadi (瓦地的小号) by Sami Michael right now.

Ironically, it could well be that both these novels were translated based on English renditions (Blue Mountain and A Trumpet in the Wadi, respectively), not the original Hebrew. Crafty publishers in China often don’t list the language of the original work; instead, they identify the author by nationality, leaving you to guess which language the Chinese edition is based on. A quick look on the web shows that the translators of Roman Russi (于海江，张颖) and Hatsotsrah-ba-wadi (李慧娟) translate almost exclusively English books, so it’s unlikely that any of the three knows Hebrew well enough to translate it.

“Chinese youth, growing up in our Socialist Motherland and benefiting from the enthusiastic care and concern of organizations such
as the Communist Party, Youth League and Young Pioneers, possess high-minded Communist ideals, and a rich, colorful and dynamic intellectual life. Therefore, reading a book like Catcher in the Rye, and comparing one’s own fortunate living environment with the odious environment under capitalism， opens one’s horizons and enriches one’s knowledge. Of course, if certain individual youths cannot distinguish the boundary between these two utterly different social systems and do not cherish Socialist Spiritual Civilization, and therefore blindly worship or imitate Holden Caulfield’s thought, actions or behavior, that would be completely erroneous. We should also be on guard against this.” (Foreword, 1982, Catcher in the Rye, Chinese edition)

Would you recruit a Shakespeare scholar to translate Catcher in the Rye?

Yilin Press, long China’s leading publisher of translated fiction, apparently did. And it’s hard to argue with that move, since the Chinese translation reportedly went on to sell almost one million copies, if Big Apple Agency is to be believed. [Read more…]

As of early 2010, Meyer’s entire Twilight series—all four translated volumes—now rank among the “Top Ten Fiction Best Sellers” in mainland China. In Taiwan, they took the top four slots on the island’s list of best-selling fiction.

What’s driving the sales: A newly acquired national passion for vampire romance? The image of the photogenic female author from the US? Integrated marketing of the films + novels that push the right buttons?

I picked up a Chinese copy of Eclipse (月食) here in Shenzhen lately, and I can tell you one thing: the reading “experience” of the Chinese reader is likely to be a bit different than among Twilight’s fervent fěnsī (fans) in the West.

Meyer’s prose seems to average 3.5 lines to a paragraph in the original. Hardly tough going. But many of the footnotes that dot her yuèshí (eclipse) take up a third of a page, and a handful occupy more than half a page. Right there in the text, not at the end of the chapter. In mice type, China style.

And get this—there are a total of 49 footnotes in the entire novel. The lion’s share fall into one of three categories: geography, Greek mythology and what one might call Americana. [Read more…]

Don’t let media in the West fool you—talking about sex in China is not taboo. But apparently references to female genitalia and orgasms are still big no-nos.

To see how such touchy subjects are handled in Chinese media, let’s take a look at what happened to the Guardian’s “China to Open First Sex Theme Park” (May 15, 2009) when it was translated and published in Cankao Xiaoxi.

As noted in my earlier updates on Cankao Xiaoxi, this daily newspaper is a respected Chinese-language digest of the world press with a long history, and in many cities across China it sells out every day before noon. Virtually no English is used and no content is added. But references deemed unbecoming to China’s image are often deleted. [Read more…]